


Not Tonight, Josephine: a duet

by paperclipbitch



Category: Elementary (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Community: fc_smorgasbord, Community: love_bingo, F/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Spoilers, i love everybody in this bar, irene adler in all incarnations is my always queen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-22
Updated: 2013-05-22
Packaged: 2017-12-12 16:30:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/813638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>sometimes before it gets better the darkness gets bigger<br/>the person that you’d take a bullet for is behind the trigger-</i>
</p>
<p>There’s only one letter’s difference between ‘deduced’ and ‘seduced’. </p>
<p>[FINALE SPOILERS]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Tonight, Josephine: a duet

**Author's Note:**

> The lyrics in the summary come from _Miss Missing You_ by FOB. Written for love_bingo – _why?_ and fc_smorgasbord – _015\. beneath the smiles; across the worlds._ And it would've been nice if I could've turned off [_Casino_](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFUf4-ECx00) from the _Nashville_ soundtrack during the several hours I was writing this, but, well, I basically didn't.

_i._

It’s possible that this isn’t working; at least, not in the way it was supposed to.

A pedestrian relationship was never going to be enough for a man living as far beyond the edge as Sherlock Holmes is, with his ticking brain full of interest but not always investment in other people – and Irene knows how _that_ feels – and in any case she’d have got bored with the ruse long ago if all it involved were linked fingers and roses. 

Still; this is new, newer than she wants to admit to or even think about. 

Sherlock brings her gifts of knowledge, of surprises, of confidences. He gives secrets the way other men give flowers; sometimes ostentatiously, pride shaping his mouth, but sometimes, worse, without even thinking about it, like it was something she was meant to have all along, no ribbons or glitter to disguise it as a gift at all.

This man of wits and calculations and always, _always_ knowing is occasionally so guileless it scares her, makes her lie awake while he sleeps in fits and starts and mumbles, and wonder just who is _winning_ here.

_ii_.

He studies the line of Joan’s back, the tension in her shoulders, and decides _better than yesterday_ before he drains his mug of tea, puts it down with a decisive click, and says: “she wanted to rescue me, you know.”

Joan knows, of course she does, she heard the tape. Still, part of her seems to think he needs to _talk_ about this, so she keeps cutting up fruit for her breakfast, replies: “what from?”

Sherlock waves a hand she isn’t looking at, waits for his thoughts to align, wonders if she’ll make him another cup of tea if he makes _that face_ she claims doesn’t work but which always does.

“From New York. From the drugs. From sanity. From boredom. From _you_ , perhaps.”

“Me?” He hears the smirk in Joan’s voice, before she half-turns to let him see it too, curtained by her still-shower-damp hair, Wednesday morning. “Am I that scary?”

“Only to psychopathic crime lords with hired killers and an arsenal of loaded weapons,” Sherlock tells her. “Only to them.”

It’s a lie, but he covers well.

_iii_. 

Irene’s never had anyone who wanted to destroy the world simply because she wasn’t in it anymore.

_iv._

“You’re recovering,” Joan scolds, when Sherlock checks his phone for the twenty-eighth time today and there’s still no one asking him to help with a case. He highly doubts that New York has suddenly started behaving itself.

“Recovering is for other people,” Sherlock tells her, swinging his arms to demonstrate and flinching when it turns out that his shoulder is still exploding in bursts of pain when he least expects it to.

Joan is kind enough to hide her smile, but sadistic enough to allow him to _see_ that she’s hiding it.

“I highly doubt I have any more ex-girlfriends who will reveal themselves to be murderers,” he adds, sniffy, rocking on his feet. Ms Hudson is apparently responding to recent events by cleaning the brownstone to an extent he is beginning to find uncomfortable; he’s not entirely sure the floors have ever been waxed, and they feel strangely slick and sticky beneath his toes.

“Because you don’t _have_ any more ex-girlfriends?” Joan enquires, arching an eyebrow. Her tone is sharp: the one she uses because she doesn’t like it when he’s flippant about Irene, but she isn’t going to call him out on it _this time_.

“Precisely,” he agrees. “It’s your turn now, Watson. Find me a criminal that _you’ve_ had relations with.”

Joan’s expression speaks _volumes_.

_v._

There’s a case Sherlock is helping with that Irene has no stake in; at least, not one large enough to risk distraction, and she has actual gainful employment for once. She likes the current work as an art restorer, even if the right painting doesn’t always make it back, and for the hundredth time despises just how long she’s kept this little ruse spinning on.

She hasn’t seen him for a few days, which is alright: he lights up when he’s busy, but it’s the kind of light that comes from not sleeping, not eating, from running himself ragged around London with his brain on fire and his body rushing behind. It’s difficult to watch, and uncomfortable to be around, and it often leaves Irene concerned that he can see right through her. No, it’s better to stay apart until Sherlock returns to what passes for normal.

The letter arrives late in the morning, a heavy cream-coloured envelope of thick paper stock, and she runs her thumb over his careless, hurried handwriting.

Sherlock likes speed. He sends text messages formed of bundles of random letters, brand new acronyms, dashes off emails where it’s clear his brain was moving faster than his fingers on the keyboard, and yet. And _yet_.

It’s something like a love letter, something devastatingly focussed, something crazed and distracted, something that is utterly ridiculous and yet she cannot laugh at it. She wants to, to hold it up as a trophy, but she can’t; when her mouth trembles she has the horrible suspicion that she’s going to cry.

Instead, she calls up her favourite independent bookshop and has them deliver a copy of _The Love Letters of Great Men_ to Sherlock’s flat, while she makes herself a fortifying cup of tea and slugs in some whiskey while she’s at it.

In the end, she finds some paper of her own, scrawls: _well, it’s hardly James Joyce, you fucking sap_ , and tells herself that she’s only trying to drag him deeper.

_vi_.

Sherlock wants to peel back Irene’s skin and crawl beneath it, live in-between her ribs and her breath, where her blood is warm and every part of her is known.

He’s heard enough confessions from criminals, read enough words from serial killers, to be aware how that desire sounds aloud, even if he’s only telling it to Angus, who cannot judge, being a ceramic head and nothing more. Some days, fingertips pressed to windowpanes, thinking simply _I love you in a way I don’t understand, can maybe never understand_ , he suspects that this can only end in a double suicide.

He mentions this to Irene one night, drunk, and she laughs. “You can keep that Romeo and Juliet shit to yourself.”

“We’re not idiotic _teenagers_ ,” he stumbles, sharp, and she rolls her eyes, make-up smudged, crimson paint caught under her fingernails. 

“So you were thinking Sid and Nancy then,” Irene counters. “Or maybe Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Butch and Sundance,” he offered, and she bit into his mouth, tasting of smoke and whisky, hair smelling like sex and turpentine. 

There are no happy endings for love affairs like this, he knows, borrowed time the only certainty there is.

_vii._

Joan Watson comes to visit her in prison, wearing a pair of shoes Irene thinks are impractical but covets anyway.

Solitary confinement is dull, on the whole, but there are times when it’s relaxing. Irene hasn’t rested in a long time, and, after all, she can leave when she wants to. Until then, she’ll recuperate.

“You didn’t bake me anything?” she asks. They’re alone, either side of a table, Irene’s wrists cuffed together. Her hair’s had better days and the jumpsuit is _ugly_ , but no one ever claims that imprisonment is conducive to maintaining dignity.

Joan remains unblinking, presumably because any extended period of time with Sherlock would strip one of reacting to minor irritations, and Irene thinks of _she solved you_ and the clench of her teeth is bitter.

The point of Moriarty, almost the _entire_ point of Moriarty, was not to need to be accountable to anyone.

“Have you come here to ask questions, Miss Watson?” she asks at last. “Snipping the loose ends?” She leans forward as far as she can without a guard coming over, and adds, softer: “or have you come to ask about Sherlock? You can bring him as many little insights as you like, but he’ll never look at you the way he looked at me.”

Joan’s only response is: “you don’t know him anymore.”

Irene laughs; can’t stop herself, doesn’t try. “You haven’t _changed_ him, you know,” she tells her, scornful. “You can’t.”

Joan finally smiles, and Irene hates it, because she used to wear that smile herself. “No,” she agrees. “But you did.”

_viii._

It can be exhilarating, stripping everything back from a person to see them as they truly are. It can be disturbing, the shock of raw truth revealing something you never wanted to see but maybe suspected was there all along. It can be… god, it can be intimate.

There’s only one letter’s difference between ‘deduced’ and ‘seduced’.

Sherlock sometimes wishes that the line was more clearly defined.

_ix._

Irene has spent a considerable amount of time living in and out of different skins, assuming identities like that tired clichéd metaphor involving other people’s coats. From a childhood feigning the obedient daughter that still somehow wasn’t wanted, a short-lived marriage that she tried to Stepford her way through only to find that still wasn’t enough, to the most perfect anonymous crime villain anyone will ever know, if only they could have heard of her, she’s assumed roles better than any Oscar winner, and with far less of a budget.

It takes talent, you know, to maintain an American accent that you don’t have when Sherlock Holmes is between your thighs, talking a pretentious mile a minute into your cunt.

It’s possible this is why Irene doesn’t lie when she says she doesn’t create anything original; she can copy paintings the way the Masters can only _wish_ they’d painted them, but dip the brush as herself and all inspiration deserts her.

Still, there’s a first time for everything, and this time, _this_ time, she paints what she tells Sherlock she’s painting: a magnum opus, a masterpiece, something she didn’t even know she was capable of. It’s the first lit match of an inferno, and she still hasn’t decided if she’ll leave it behind for him when she goes.

So Irene paints and paints and paints, and collects carefully-stored packages of her own blood in the refrigerator.

_x._

There’s a horrible suspicion, brittle and untouchable in Sherlock’s mind, that some part of him came to America chasing Irene. 

Since arriving in America, he’s collected an ex-drug counsellor as an assistant, tentative employment and the colleagues that come with it, a sponsor, a tortoise, a part-time housekeeper, a reliable and discreet escort service, and an entirely new species of bee. 

He hasn’t quite figured out if he feels rewarded or trapped.

Joan’s already threatening a birthday party, something gleeful in her eyes that tells him things are easing, while Sherlock insists his father doesn’t know when his birthday is and so all the details he put on the forms are wrong. 

“At least,” he muses aloud on the end of that train of thought, “Moriarty didn’t turn out to be my father.”

Joan looks up from her magazine. “Did I miss the part where we were considering that possibility?”

Sherlock shrugs with one shoulder, and it stings as it strains the still-healing bullet wound. “It was on the wall,” he offers.

“Before or after you started tacking up printouts of Napoleon?” Joan asks dryly. Her expression is softening, though, and she adds, carefully: “do you need to talk about your father?”

“It was only an ersatz heroin overdose, Watson,” he reminds her, adding a snip to the words, but one he’s not entirely sure that he means it.

“You could talk to Alfredo,” Joan offers. “It’s what he’s there for.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes and she turns back to her magazine, while he briefly wonders why recovery means being forced to _share_ so much, and who did he talk to before he came to New York, and oh, yes, there’s Irene again.

_xi_.

Saturday night, Sherlock comes over with a picnic that consists of champagne and liquorice allsorts, which they eat on the roof of the National Gallery after running through the galleries hand in hand, bare feet on the floorboards, fucking quick and secretive on top of her coat in the Impressionist galleries.

Irene knows how to disable security at the National Gallery, of _course_ , but she’s curious about how Sherlock managed it. He’s got the makings of a decent criminal, she notes, though doesn’t follow the thought to the end of the process.

Wednesday, they ostensibly go stargazing on Hampstead Heath, though there’s barely time to bicker over constellations before Sherlock casually foils a murder plot he apparently figured out earlier in the week but didn’t have enough evidence to take to Scotland Yard. Or perhaps it’s merely Sherlock being _Sherlock_.

Irene stands back and berates him like a girlfriend probably _should_ while Sherlock beats three thugs into a bloody pulp, a length of garrotte wire concealed in her palm, just in _case_.

Later, she holds a tea-towel wrapped icepack to his black eye while she rides him, deep and slow, and he mumbles apologies that don’t make sense and that he doesn’t mean to her breasts through split lips.

_You’re an idiot_ , she writes to him on Friday, her turn, fountain pen on expensive paper, _you’re an idiot, and I couldn’t see any stars once all the police showed up anyway._

She sucks her lower lip into her mouth, and adds: _and no one’s ever taken me on a better date, you fucking psycho._

_xii._

The next time Joan finds Sherlock with his gloves and needles, she just sighs and goes to get them both some coffee.

“So, which tattoo is about Irene?” she asks when he’s done, when there won’t be a damaging and telltale slip of his hand.

Sherlock had most of his tattoos when he met her; she remarked on how beautiful they were, fingers splayed against his bare skin, exploring the coloured lines with lips and teeth, her hair a tumble of pale gold he knotted his hands into when she slid his cock into her mouth, nails in his thighs, her fellatio a work of art more magnificent than anything she ever painted.

She designed him a half-dozen tattoos, permanent marker on his back, staining his sheets. Sometimes, she’d just write _Property of Irene Adler_ on his arse, burying dirty laughter in the small of his back, sometimes she’d sketch something elaborate over his ribcage, transient and permanent all at once, and he’d watch her concentrate for as long as it took without any trace of restless movement, because he could look at that face lost in thought for forever.

Joan’s still waiting for a reply, steam rising from her mug, and Sherlock lets out a long breath that isn’t quite a sigh. “I don’t know, Watson,” he says, “all of them?”

_xiii._

Irene’s victory was supposed to feel better than this. Sometimes she wonders whose side she’s even _on_.

_xiv._

While Joan is out having coffee with a friend, Sherlock takes everything out of his wardrobe, looks at it, and puts it back again.

He’s lived years in jeans and t-shirts from bedroom floors, in buttoning shirts to try and keep a façade of respectability, in wearing suits and ties to make his father happy until he realised he was never going to be happy and a tie is really just a murder weapon you’ve already tied in a noose to aid your murderer.

Irene could dress to impress and could impress him just as much in nothing at all, bent over one of her worktables, hair swishing down her shoulders, thighs spread in demanding invitation, and Sherlock can at least tell a real orgasm from a claimed one; Irene wasn’t faking _everything_ with him.

“Don’t go,” Alfredo told him the last time they met up, and Sherlock pretended to have no idea what he was talking about it.

“I mean it,” Alfredo added, curling fingers around Sherlock’s arm; he only touches him in necessity, Sherlock maintains boundaries how he likes them, and the emphasis that came from fingertips against his bicep nearly stung.

Joan won’t talk about it, which is interesting, but he needs to gather a little more information before forming a steadfast conclusion.

Sherlock has altogether too much still to say, most of which he should keep to himself, some of which amounts to little more than: _I fucking won_.

The problem, which is too laughable to be a real problem and one he will never, _never_ say out loud, is that Sherlock doesn’t care about his appearance but Irene does, and he cannot go to the prison and sit opposite her and look her in the eye until he knows what to wear.

_xv._

She learns of the overdose at the moment when her triumph should be absolute, and it sours it so irrevocably she could scream.

It feels a little like the first time Irene took a step back from her canvas, from the first thing she’d ever truly painted herself, in no one’s style but her own, and she found Sherlock Holmes looking back at her from every last fucking brushstroke. Until that point, faking her own death had been a contingency plan, one she was preparing in case she needed it; that painting, which she promptly soaked in turpentine and burned with a paper cup over the smoke alarm, made it nothing but a necessity.

The last time she made this choice, Irene walked away. She should, of course, do the same now. 

(Sherlock is a secret she’ll take to the grave. It doesn’t matter whose. It by no means needs to be _hers_.)

Irene considers her half-reflection in the window, and thinks about how she could be in Europe in a few hours, untraceable, and this mess can be Joan Watson’s to clean up all over again; a career in tidying other people’s messes, in reassembling jigsaw puzzles with half the pieces already missing. She thinks about how many schemes she’s waiting to hear back about, about how many threads she holds in her hands.

She thinks about Sherlock in the hospital, yet another overdose with her name on it.

“Frailty; thy name is woman,” she murmurs, and switches the lights off when she leaves.


End file.
